Times are tough. Governments across the globe need to find ways to keep up with ever-faster changing times, move beyond the constraints of traditional approaches, and leverage innovation to improve public policies and services. One way many governments have sought to advance innovation was by establishing public sector innovation labs over the past 20 years or so. In our first post we outlined the main purposes and learnings of public innovation labs. In this post,...
Posts on Public Service
As Head of Nido, I am constantly looking to stimulate civil servants to innovate faster and smarter. I thrive on calculated risks, ones that we have dissected and are thoroughly understood. Unforeseen mishaps are not my cup of tea. This inclination can be traced back to my previous role as an Internal Control Manager (risk manager). This experience provided invaluable insights into how an organisation structures its aspirations and operations. The public sector is traditionally...
This is Part 1 of a bolg series on Government Communities of Practice for Innovation, in which we will explore the existing research and international examples and identify the factors and start-up practices that are likely to catalyse new ideas and embed innovation in organisations and institutions. Read Part 2: “Engage, test, refine – and repeat: Designing and piloting a community of practice in Ireland“. Government communities of practice are not new. There are countless...
Looking back, this last year has once again been very challenging yet ambitious for Nido, the innovation lab for the Belgian public sector. We have racked up a number of successful and exciting achievements. Yet getting there in the face of a tenacious status quo has, all too often, required a Herculean effort from our staff. This made me reflect on how the lab and its staff should best act and react in order to move...
Public sector innovation is on the rise, in classrooms and outside. As a researcher, lecturer and ex- practitioner of public sector innovation, I was pleased to deliver an executive course on Innovation and Transformation in Government as part of Brazil`s National School of Public Administration (ENAP) Masters in Public Policy. In this blog, I will reflect my experience on the course design and delivery as well as on how OECD and OPSI tools have helped...
The standard advice for government innovators is: “First make sure you have the support of agency leaders.” That’s like advising soldiers: “First make sure the enemy has run out of ammunition.” It would be great, but if you wait for it to happen then you may never act. The Independent Demonstration Project is a strategy to innovate in government without…
“We create and re-create narratives throughout our lives to make sense of what happened, to process experience, to interpret and reinterpret our view of the world as life unfolds. I believe that beautiful and difficult process is what it is to be human.” Lauren Oakes For me, significant transitions in life prompt such introspection and recreation of narratives – to reflect on key moments that have shaped who I am and how I think. Recently,...
Last week, the OPSI hosted a Rules as Code meet-up for government and inter-governmental organisation (IGO) officials. The meet-up was the first of several that the OPSI intends to host in support of a growing movement in public administration inspired by the promise of Rules as Code (RaC). We at OPSI believe in the promise of RaC as an emergent approach, something we explored in our RaC primer. We think that this is something which...
Official dates for the next edition of the World Government Summit at Expo 2020 Dubai have been announced. It will take place in November 22-25, 2020. The event is a four-day summit that will gather over 10,000 high-profile officials, 30 international organisations and 600 experts and scholars. The World Government Summit– Expo 2020 will present new platforms and exceptional ideas to foster forward-looking government culture on a global scale. It will also offer the world’s...
The annual meeting of the Mission-Oriented Innovation Network (MOIN) chaired by Prof. Mariana Mazzucato and Prof. Rainer Kattel took place at the Rockerfeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre between March 27-29, 2019. In the picturesque setting by Lake Como, over 20 organisations worked on various aspects of mission-oriented innovation including evaluation and assessment, tools and methods to deliver on missions. I represented OPSI, as lead on systems thinking and anticipatory governance and my…